NORTH MIAMI, Fla. – Following a 3-1 termination vote Tuesday night, it’s still unclear why a group of North Miami city councilmembers voted to fire City Manager Rasha Cameau. But Local 10 News has obtained a memo from the now-ousted top administrator that sheds light on her forced departure.

Residents packed Tuesday night’s special city council meeting in an attempt to save Cameau’s job. They credit her with cleaning house and turning the city around.

“You run (the city) like a banana republic,” resident Mary Brown told councilmembers.

Vice Mayor Mary Estimé-Irvin and councilmembers Pierre Frantz Charles and Kassandra Timothe were the deciding votes. Longtime Councilman Scott Galvin voted against firing Cameau.

Mayor Alix Desulme, who wasn’t present at the meeting, had previously expressed opposition to firing Cameau, calling the passage of a motion to consider her firing in April a “sad day” for the city.

Residents booed the council following the vote.

None of the councilmembers have elaborated on why they wanted Cameau out.

Residents point to Cameau declining councilmembers’ requests for unbudgeted money to spend, including for a festival, as she righted the city’s financial decline.

Local 10 News has learned that Cameau, seeing the writing on the wall, memorialized the signs in a memo, in which she described herself as “busy putting out fires.”

The memo is titled “Re: Events That Led Up to My Termination.”

She documented efforts to hold the public works director accountable for failures with a multi-million dollar water project, only to have councilmembers backdoor her to spare him, violating the city charter.

They got outsiders to intervene: one of them was a longtime city lobbyist who claimed people thought her actions were racially-motivated.

She wrote that she was told that “the word on the street is that I am firing Haitians and replacing them with ‘blans,’” the Creole term for non-Haitians.

Cameau is a Haitian-American.

Read the memo:

The council appointed Anna-Bo Emmanuel as interim city manager.

That raised even more questions. If councilmembers collaborated behind the scenes, it would violate Florida’s Sunshine Laws.

Following Tuesday night’s vote, Cameau told local media outlets, “I’ve been a public servant for over 20 years and I will be there to serve the public again.”

Cameau is expected to request a public hearing on her termination, which she is entitled to.

Residents are discussing recalls of the councilmembers, as well as lawsuits.

Kick Sauber drivers Valtteri Bottas and Zhou Guanyu were left to rue challenging weekends at the Miami Grand Prix as their quest to score a first point of the season rumbled on.

With the Sprint format in play, Bottas and Zhou both suffered successive SQ1 and Q1 exits around the Miami International Autodrome – the Chinese racer slowest of all during qualifying for the Grand Prix.

READ MORE: Miami Grand Prix attracts F1’s largest live audience in United States television history

In the Grand Prix itself, the pair were unable to make an impression on the points-paying positions, with Bottas taking a risk by starting on softs and Zhou by finishing on them following a mid-race Safety Car.

Reflecting on setting off and finishing in 16th, Bottas said: “Of course, the starting position wasn’t the best, so I think it was good to try something different. Then, honestly, with that strategy, the timing of the Safety Car was the worst possible.

As the official submission to the FIA about its developments revealed, almost no aerodynamic surface had been left untouched with the full package of changes that had been fitted to Lando Norris’s car.

While the Woking-based squad had teased beforehand about the revisions being part of efforts to address a weakness in low speed, the true motive of these latest developments was obvious: pure downforce.

In F1, though, not all downforce is the same – and the key to real success is in delivering it in as efficient a manner as possible.

Depending on which way you look at it, efficiency is about too much drag, or too little downforce, for a set wing level.

It is quite easy to bring a barn door rear wing that produces a ton of ‘dirty’ downforce to help you be quick around the corners, but that is no good as soon as a car starts stretching its legs on the straights.

What is critical to understand about McLaren’s Miami upgrades is that it brought a double whammy of gains: more clean downforce to be quicker around the corners, which opened the door to letting it run less wing (so more speed on the straights). It was very much a case of having its cake and eating it.

As McLaren team boss Andrea Stella explained, the focus of its effort was on bringing efficient downforce that did not add drag – which then allowed it to trim things off elsewhere.

So after a recent history of it being slightly on the back foot on the straights, it did not go unnoticed that it was more competitive against its rivals now.

“We had good top speed here,” explained Stella. “One of the reasons is that we on purpose decided to go for a relatively light rear wing.

“We could do that because we added downforce through the package, and this means that we needed to be less demanding from a rear wing point of view, which is never too efficient.

“When you upgrade a car with floors and sidepods, it’s always more efficient than putting downforce on with a rear wing.”

The overall benefits of the package were also complemented by it going a slightly different way to what would be expected on set-up.

So rather than capitalising on the advantage it has over rivals in high-speed corners, it shifted its focus to be better optimised for the slower sections.

As Stella explained: “We consciously decided to set up the car to maximise low-speed performance.

“The decent performance we had in low-speed is not necessarily because of the characteristic of the package, it’s also because of some conscious decisions as to how we set up the cars to make sure that we were as strong as possible in low-speed.

“If you look at qualifying, we lost quite a lot of time in the high-speed section, but this was kind of a deliberate set-up choice.”

Miami was just the start, and there is more to come too. Stella suggests that upgrades in the pipeline will help further address the problems it has faced in low-speed.

Asked about how much the upgrades had solved its weakness in this area, Stella said: “Not to the entirety that we would have wished. There’s some more specific work and upgrades that we need to deliver to address low-speed in particular.”

Even before the well-timed safety car helped Norris on his way to victory, the potential of the new McLaren upgrade was pretty clear to see.

It hadn’t been shown – with that scrappy lap in SQ3 and a Turn 1 exit in the sprint – but when he got clear air in the race, Norris was flying.

As the Briton explained after the race: “I said already on Friday, it felt good. I was confident on Friday and today that kind of feeling came back to me a lot. It was good. A lot of Sundays recently have been strong. Just today we managed to step it up and turn it into something even more.”

Key now though will be in finding out in Imola as to whether the upgrades are a sign that McLaren is now a genuine threat to Red Bull, or if it was simply good fortune in Miami that helped Norris come out on top.

As runner-up Max Verstappen said when asked about whether he thought he could have won without the safety car: “I mean, it’s always if, if, if, right? If my mum had balls, she would be my dad.

“It’s how it goes to racing. Sometimes it works out for you, sometimes it doesn’t.”

McLaren’s job now is to turn the sometimes into more times.

Additional reporting by Filip Cleeren and Ronald Vording.

Advertisement

Watch: F1 2024 Miami GP Review – Lando Seizes his Historic Maiden Win